On Recursion

The cybernetic principle of recursion and its organisational implications

"Recursive Blanket Flower" by gadl is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Social organisations and institutions do not exist in a vacuum. Each such system operates within wider systems. No person or organisation is entirely discrete. An organisation, such as a cooperative, trade union or political party, exists at a given level of abstraction.

Drill down into an organisation and you will find discrete operational units (sometimes themselves entirely capable of operating as their own viable system) from locals, branches, departments or teams. Scale up and you will find that organisation operating within a wider system. A teachers’ union, for example, operates within an education system, and that education system is itself nested in a political system. Stafford Beer calls this recursion. It is the idea that each organisation may exist at a given level of abstraction but consists of units operating at a more immediate level even as it also caught up within a wider system.

The simplicity of recursion

Recursion is not a groundbreaking concept. I’m very likely not relating anything new to you. Recursion is a simple fact. It is part of the material world we occupy. You yourself are not only a single human being, a viable system, but within you are multiple ecosystems with trillions of microbes from the microorganisms in your gut to the bacteria on your skin. There is a good chance that other organisms outnumber your own cells in your own body.

You’ve probably already seen a chaos fractal play out. This is recursion operating across scales of abstraction.

Recursion is probably not even new to your understanding of organisational dynamics. You might have experienced a particularly over controlling executive in your workplace and thought that “they cannot see the forest from the trees”. Yet, it is the very simplicity of the idea of recursion that means it is often missed in complex situations from organisational leadership to working through broader Left strategy.

Recursion’s strategic implications at the scale of system change

With the Left in the Global North beginning to crawl back from the neoliberal wipe out and re-organise, recursion has considerable strategic implications. Take winning a government as an example. The government itself is but a temporary administration that exists within the state, and a state is itself but one system within a wider capitalist social system. What any single government administration can achieve, therefore, is dependent on the power relations prevailing in the wider capitalist social system.

Moreover, instability in the capitalist social system or even just the state itself (think of a military coup here) is more than capable of ending any one administration. The act of holding government alone in a capitalist system is definitionally incapable of building socialist relations.

Perhaps, a system based on domination and exploitation requires a certain degree of instability to survive. As Michal Kalecki foresaw in his 1943 essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment, the stability generated by full employment for the working-class leaders to capitalist reaction. For when workers no longer fear the discipline of unemployment, their confidence will grow such that they will challenge the privilege of their bosses. A generation beforehand, Kalecki called the dynamic that would play in the cycle of rebellion and reaction from the 1960s to the 1980s.

On the other hand, if capitalist instability veers into collapse then a revolutionary window opens up. For if workers have already lost nearly anything, then what stake do they have in holding up a collapsed regime? Basically if the wider level of recursion ceases to function as a system then the field opens up to redefine its relations of reproduction. It was Lenin’s strategic genius to spot this opportunity in a Russian social system wrecked completely by World War I even as it did not neatly map onto the conventional revolutionary wisdom of the day of revolutions emanating out from the more advanced capitalist nations.

Of course, these are only two indicators of conditions ripe for transformational change not an exhaustive list. Life is far more complex than this. But unless one genuinely thinks the revolution is going to just happen tomorrow, our responsibility is to organise.

Recursion and building viable organisations

The principle of recursion is valuable both as a new generation of leaders takes charge of existing organisations, and as a vibrant Left builds rapidly expanding organisations. This is especially important for two reasons. First, for the very operational effectiveness of the Left’s organisations and institutions. Second, for the lived experience of everyday freedom of those working (whether voluntary or paid) in these very same organisations. The principle of recursion is a guardrail against micro-management.

Beer in The Heart of Enterprise recounts an example from a firm he was involved with of senior executives getting stuck in “two hours of argument as to whether a particular youth was or was not entitled to a tea break”. This sort of thing is not limited to capitalist enterprises. I have witnessed very similar behaviour in time within the labour movement. It never leads to good decision-making and if anything, diverts the time of the organisation away from addressing strategic issues.

Such failure can result from an intention to assert dominance or it can stem from simple inexperience. The organisational result is often the same regardless of the intention of the actor. It can be no simple thing to work through what level a matter should be dealt with. Beer wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles on cybernetic management that dealt with the question. And as Project CyberOrg goes on, I will do my best to unpack this.

What I would say is provisional is this:

Where possible elected leaders need to maximise operational autonomy.

You need skilled operatives and organisers who can problem solve in a complex world. This increases the rate of daily cooperation and power. Discipline, in this regard, is over rated. As a leader, you should find order by dancing on the edge of chaos rather than seeking to command it into existence. It is better to err in this direction for erring on the side of control leads to organisational stagnation.

This post is part of the Project CyberOrg series.